I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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Only if we would have natural solution to this problem.... Let's fuck up the planet even more by producing more shit. How about planting trees and stopping the deforestation.
Planting trees doesn’t produce revenue for billionaires and shareholders. This does. Ergo we must produce expensive, over engineered machines to replace trees. Bees are next.
Trees are inefficient too but we actually already know what we need to do to ramp up the efficiency of the photosynthesis process in trees with genetic tinkering.
The bigger problem is that we have reached a point where trees aren’t enough anymore. The oceans have acidified. There’s just too much co2 to capture at this point.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know trees are no real solution. Yes, they take CO2 to grow, but everything is released again when they die and are consumed by bacteria which just didn't exist a few million years ago. So they only ever store what the forest is made of and not a bit more. They will rot and never ever become coal again. So while it sounds nice to plant a forest and there are other benefits, when if we planted a forest on every inch of the planet it would not solve our problem. Am I wrong here? Tell me!
The net new total biomass of the forests would all be captured carbon. Yes dead trees may release it again but the total amount of trees would be higher and act as a large buffer.
That carbon will stay sequestered if the trees are cut down, and the wood is used to build something that lasts for a long time.
A long time isn't forever. Wood burns and wood rots. How many wooden structures from over a thousand years ago are still around?
I'm just saying we aren't helping ourselves with this plastic throw-away culture we've developed. Things like fine wood furniture can last as long as the owner wants it to. Every time something is replaced, it ends up somewhere in the environment, and we have the carbon footprint of something new being made. Beautifully made objects tend to be restored when they get old and ratty. When was the last time a Frank Lloyd Wright house was torn down to be replaced by a McMansion? That wood is sequestered.
The carbon in that wood is only sequestered until it rots or burns. It may be a hundred years, it may be a thousand years, but it has not been removed from the carbon cycle. At best, you're kicking the can down the road.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
This is one case where kicking the can down the road is the best option we really have, as long as we don’t stop working on the tech we need down said road. In a few hundred years we’ll probably have far better solutions, or a radically different lifestyle and technology than now. But we don’t have those now. And right now every little bit will help.
Keep in mind we’ve only been industrial for what, a couple hundred years? Sequestering for equivalent to the entire span we’ve been causing the problem seems like a pretty good start.
I want to be clear, nowhere have I said that we shouldn't be planting trees. Having a deeper reservoir for the carbon will buy time to develop more efficient and permanent sequestration technologies. It's just that a lot of people in these comments seem to think that we shouldn't even pursue sequestration tech because trees exist, despite the fact that they fill different roles in the solution to anthropogenic climate change
Every bit we capture helps.
Not if it's a distraction from better solutions.
Neither trees nor these can help much if fossil fuels continue to be burned at increasing rates.
That's for sure. But as I don't see people going away from fossil fuels anytime soon, we have to at least make it less terrible. EVs aren't an answer, as making the batteries fucks up the nature a lot, wind power takes more energy to build than it will return in it's lifetime and the machines will haunt us after they are decommissioned. I live in northern Sweden and because people in south aren't too keen to look at those ugly things, they place it around their colony, the north. So we have new roads in forests, trees are being cut fo huge wind farms screwing up our ecosystem and being transported up here mostly from Denmark. Everyone trying to minimize their impact is currently at least a dim path forward. People are against nuclear, but if properly executed, it is currently the cleanest energy we have. Let's hope cold fusion comes quick.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/06/07/fact-check-wind-turbines-quickly-recoup-energy-used-make-them/9542766002/
Reduction in emissions, absolutely! Direct carbon capture isn’t that. It’s a scam, destroying money for no benefit.
Also this plant are (with the latest technology) really less efficient than trees, like 60-70% less efficient IIRC.
Yeah, and the Wright Flyer could only travel like 30 yards. A 10 megabyte hard drive used to fill an entire room. You can't build a better machine without building the worse ones first
The goal of this plant isn’t to be a solution : it’s greenwashing. It’s making people believe that capitalism have an answer to climate change
I never said anything about capitalism. Do you think socialists and communists don't burn fossil fuels? Do you think tree planting initiatives aren't greenwashing? Technological progress continues regardless of economic systems, and this is an early step in carbon sequestration technology. A technology we will still need after we abolish fossil fuels and capitalism, because we have put more carbon into the carbon cycle than the carbon cycle evolved to handle.
Planting trees is only a temporary carbon hold. Also, it takes like 200 trees to offset the carbon for a years worth of driving from a single car.
I do have strong doubts about the usefulness of these fans, though.
Looks like your get the post text!